What's New in Kentico CMS 4.0

As you probably know, we have recently released version 4.0. It brings new social networking features and many minor improvements in existing modules. It comes with a new Community Starter Site that allows you to quickly start new on-line communities.

The new modules in version 4.0 include:

Groups

Friends

Message boards

Media libraries

Tags and categories (taxonomy)

Content rating

Built-in browser-based image editor

Notification engine

URL aliasing

Blogs and Forums were significantly improved

You can find an overview of new features here. The upgrade procedure is available here.

In this newsletter, I'd like to mention a few minor improvements that were requested by many of our clients:

Blogs

The Blogs module now allows users to write blog posts through the live web site without going to the administration interface. It also supports tagging, categories, pings, trackbacks, rating and social bookmarking.

Tagging

You can tag any type of document and display a tag cloud on your web site allowing users the choose content by topic.

The new version also supports categories as another way how to organize content.

One-click AJAX Support

You can easily configure almost any web part so that it uses AJAX instead of postbacks. It's as easy as checking the box Use update panel in the web part properties. You can try that with Newsletter subscription web part or with a Repeater web part that uses paging.

Friendly URLs in Links

In the previous versions, the links created in the editor used special format that ensured the links will not stop working if the document is moved or renamed. It looked like this:

/getdoc/bc8a237e-ad06-4e6b-930c-499ac413bba0/nikon-d40.aspx

Now you can use direct links like this:

/cameras/digital/nikon-d40.aspx

When a document is moved, the system automatically saves the original address as a new URL alias of the document. You can also create such URL aliases manually if you need to use multiple URLs that point to the same page, which may be useful for tracking of marketing campaigns.

You can enable direct links in CMS Site Manager -> Settings -> URLs - uncheck the box Use permanent URLs and check the box Remember original URLs when moving documents.

Content Rating

You can easily add a content rating web part to the page or you can insert a rating in-line control through the editor:

Content Subscriptions

With the new Notifications engine, you can let the users subscribe to chosen events and retrieve notifications through e-mail or some other media. One of the examples how you can use it is sending e-mail notifications if some content is modified. For example, subscribed users can receive a notification when a news item is published on the site.

If you happen to be there, please be sure to stop by to meet our team.

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